ON MY RADIO

MP3 is all very good and groovey, but there are other aspects of music
over the Net that are also worth investigating. We sent SIMON MORRISON
along to interFACE, a Net radio station that's been making waves ( ho
ho) on the dance scene.

Not all music you'll find on the Net comes in the form of pirated MP3
sorts of commercial tunes. There's also the becoming field of Internet
radio, so i popped down to interFACE for a chat with the main man there.

interFACE is run by Mad Ash who after several years cruising the
radio waves as a pirate, was known to pull down the skull and crossbones
and exploit the fresh, innovative and essentially unregulated medium of the
Net. "The BTI kept coming and taking my equipment," he deadpans. "I used
to see it as paying my royalty fee really. But you're always looking for
the next move- I was looking for a natural progression for
broadcasting." That move was interFACE, which can be found at
http://interface.pirate-radio.co.uk, and presently involves around 72
DJs, with a vibrant varaiaty of music, from jungle to soul,
transmitting 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No rest for the wicked.

The sheer buzz around the subject of Internet radio is hard to
ignore. As well as the real time audio ( the station broadcasts using
RealAudio and can be accessed using RealPlayer, version 5, of which can
be downloaded via a link at the site), the station also offers live
video footage of the DJs at work. The concept of the electronic
community and the station as an "interFACE" is also crucial-"shouts"
(messages and dedications) come in via e-mail from all over the world
and are fed to the DJs, who can relay them back to from Barbados to
Moscow, while the dedicated chat room allows people to meet up in
cyberspace.

"interFACE" really is a community thing," Ash enthuses, "It's
interactive radio...it's the next stage in radio."

There are undeniably strong positives. Finally the Internet is a
powerful medium for the live transmission of outside broadcast from club
nights, Glastonbury Festival, and will soon transmit from an Indian
Reservation.probably in Canada.
By recording the number of hits to the site, Ash can build up a much
clearer picture of listenership than the flawed guessed figures could
ever offer conventional radio stations. Most importantly, there's lots
of fun to be had. The station's music has been pumped out everywhere
from a "virtual" party at a U.S.
airforce base in Okinawa, Japan to a shopping mall in the States-
when a hacker
accessed the malls computer and secretively, substituted interFACE for
the music that was limping out of the Tanoy system.

Of course, there needs to be considerable hackroom support for
such an operation and that support comes from A.L. Digital. Says A.L's
.Dominique, G."It's really just by demand- it's the future way of doing things. If
you want to run a service and people want to listen to it, it will be
successful and you'll build up that listenership." A.L.'s satelite dish
recieves the downlink from any of the transmitters to filter the interFACE
audio and video through three servers, two in the States and one in the
U.K.
The station's undoubtedly well-named, demonstrating how
something as organic as music can interface with the sharp end of modern
technology..so tune in, turn on and erm.. drop by.